We didn’t have many of them, but when they came, they were glorious.
They were better than Saturdays or Sundays. They were more thrilling than summer days.
The beauty of summer days in childhood was their languor. Summer was endless, and the days were hot and lazy.
But on snow days, the adrenaline pumped all day. School-day cortisol was already pumping when the news of the snow day unleashed a flood of endorphins — the chemical combination in the schoolboy body was electric.
Activity was nonstop — sledding, snowball fights, sledding on a bigger hill, and best of all, snow football.
Snow-day football was perhaps the greatest activity a 12-year-old boy could participate in. The games started earlier than weekend games both because we woke up earlier and because of the extraordinary adrenaline levels.
The fields were never so beautiful as when blanketed with snow. If it was falling, the games seemed dreamlike. Getting tackled hurt less. Touchdown celebrations were snow angels. Life didn’t get any better.
Yet this morning, with snow blanketing my old hometown, the students in New York aren’t donning their snow gear — they’re trying to log on to a “remote learning” website so as to spend their day in front of a screen.
Set aside for a moment the fact that there’s no such thing as “remote learning” for younger students and just consider the cruelty of this: depriving children of snowmen, sledding, and football to make sure that 1 out of 178 instructional days isn’t missed or delayed.
A human in New York gets only a few snow days in his or her entire childhood. Each one of them has more value than a dozen school days — and infinitely more value than a single “remote learning” day.
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Snow days are rare but eternal. They are cultural events passed down from generation to generation. Snow days are part of the culture of New York, and the bureaucrats of New York are stamping out culture with lifeless box-checking.
The students should just cut, and the teachers should too. If anything, the teachers should give a single assignment: When we return to the classroom, tell me one thing you learned on your snow day. The children may not have many profound lessons they can articulate on Wednesday or Thursday or any time soon. But 30 years from now, those students will know they are better for having spent this day in their world whose landscape was altered and made fleetingly new and beautiful and alive.
